Good Lord of the the Rings reference, Lexington, by the way. (Assuming that that's what you were going for).

As for the topic at hand, isn't the explanation almost entirely historical? The South has a relatively large proportion of black people, as does the Rust Belt, where many black people moved in the period before during and after the civil war.

I live in Philadelphia, in an area with a considerable percentage of black, Hispanic and white people, most of whom are poor. Before that I lived in a working-class mostly white neighborhood of the same city. The common thread of each was trashiness.

Trashy people of all races are almost all poor, and the results are almost never worth the effort of confronting them. And when culture and race become reasons why things can’t get done alongside the ossified egalitarianism, parochialism and machine politics of old cities, it's even harder to hope for any positive result to efforts to make a neighborhood a place where people would want to live. In response to your polite request to keep it down because the kids are trying to get to sleep, you're going to get the keynote of trashiness—profane screaming matches in the street—directed at you, up close and personal, and your car windows cracked with a thrown rock in the early morning hours.

No, the people in Portland are not running away from black people, but trashy people, using money to accomplish what populism prevents their using the law to do, and non-trashy poor people, black ones included, unfortunately get left behind as collateral damage.

@pool1745: "Maybe there are only white people at the blues because you live in a white flight area?"

Fair point; I have experience in the blues (dancing) scenes in both Seattle and San Francisco, which are both roughly ~ 10% black. On the other hand, more than ten people generally go to the dances so I would expect to see more black people.

It's hard to draw any concrete conclusion from this so I maintain that the explanation I came up with might not be *entirely* wrong. ;-)

@Winchester73 Sorry I missed the well disguised humour.
@gcross Maybe there are only white people at the blues because you live in a white flight area?
People are people and race/colour should make no difference. The society in which you grew up affects you of course.
It is rather irritating that black people in the US are quick to see discrimination, but on the other hand are aggressive about black culture in an effort to make themselves different. You cannot have it both ways.

I don't know if this is relevant, but having read Spectacularj's comment I'd like to back it.

There is a very stupid perception among many sections of the western society as a whole that diversity only exists if you have many people whose skin colours are very, very dark, i.e - people of African descent and some from the Indian sub-continent.

This definition makes sense from an artistic point of view; if you are talking about people, of course it is a nonsense. Yet a hint of such a thought keeps popping up in many venues of our lives.

I live in Seattle (born and raised), there is a common fallacy concerning diversity with this town and others like it.

Some people consider Seattle to not be very diverse just because there isn't a significant black population. In other words diversity = black, so by that definition Detroit is the most diverse city in the country.

This is completely ignores the fact that we have many Asians and Latin Americans, in fact we are far more diverse than most other cities in the US of similar size.

The most obvious explanation for this phenomena, instead of maliciously twisting statistics, is that the most progressive among the progressives are so careful to avoid offending minorities by their presence or inadvertently trampling on their rights, that they prefer to concentrate in places where they are the least likely to do it. I am sure 99% of progressive people living in those places are heart broken by the absence of blacks and other minorities and they are terribly missing diversity and the stuff, but then the saying goes that life is what it is and then you die.

@ pool1745: "The comment 'things that only white people want to do" deserves no response."

It's true, though. When I go blues dancing, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is that there are virtually no black people there, despite the fact that they invented the genre and most of the classic blues singers were black!

I eventually came up with an explanation that amuses me and might not be entirely wrong: I remember once learning in a Dance History class that there tended to be this pattern in culture of minorities innovating and whites appropriating and refining. Thus, it is possible that the fact that there doesn't seem to be many black people at blues dances might just mean that they have moved on to innovating the next new thing and we white people are just recycling their old ideas. :-)

@ Winchester73: "There just seem to be places that only white people want to live [...]"

I grew up in the DC metro area (in the state of Maryland), and I had never realized how much I appreciated the diversity of the area until I toured Centre College in Kentucky and saw a place where everyone was white, blond, had blue eyes, and even had similar facial bone structures; I think that I saw only one black person while I was there. Someone at the college told me there that they wanted me to come there because *I* would be contributing diversity. :-)

Before this experience I had always thought that "diversity" was over-hyped, but after I realized just how I had appreciated it without realizing it, since it felt really strange to go to a place where it seemed to be completely missing. :-)

When, if ever, can we get away from this constant analysis of things by race?
So these places have a lower than average black population? So what? No doubt there are many places that are above average, which proves absolutely nothing.
The comment 'things that only white people want to do" deserves no response.
The constant production of statistics about race and focus on this topic merely helps keep the topic visible, when I suspect it is irrelevant in most everyday lives. The only people who benefit are those who make a living from finding 'race' where they can, like the NAACP, or writers like Mr. Renn, seemingly desperate to get noticed.
I live in New Hampshire, and I have not checked, but I am sure it has a below average black population. There are historical reasons. The population has steadily expanded in the time I have lived here. White flight? Or simply that it is a good place to live, and has lots of high tech industry that attracts job seekers.

Cool progressive cities are not magnets for bright young professionals because of “transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes.” Special interests (contractors, artsy types, Progressives) push these projects for their own profit. Correlation is not causation and I'll prove it.
I propose a better explanation for their attraction. I’m very sure that cities that are doing poorly have more loft buildings, you know, old abandoned red brick factories than do magnets.
Rather than build all those bike lanes, cultural scenes, might it not be cheaper to dynamite these old loft buildings, and turn all those shabby cities into cool, progressive scenes?

Honestly, those cities are a little too white for me and I'm white. There just seem to be places that only white people want to live in and things that only white people want to do. These include downhill skiing, riding street (as opposed to sport) motorcycles, and serial killing. It's just one of the great mysteries of mankind.

Knowing the kind of people that live in these so-called "progressive" cities that happen to be predominantly white, I'm sure they'd love it if more black people moved there. But would more black people want to? Like I said, we're talking about REALLY white people, whiter than English people even.

Having lived in Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, and Denver I submit that each move had a lot more to do with jobs.

Cost of living and quality of life make the prospects of my staying in Denver very good.

I do object to the characterization of Denver as progressive. Denver's sentiment, at least, is not particularly progressive not by comparison to any other mid-west or western city. If the linear continuum between the left and the right has a bulge in the middle then the Colorado front range looks like that line turned to the vertical. Denver sits between the People's Republic of Boulder to the North and the Bat-Guano crazy Colorado Springs in the South. A visit to either might lead one to conclude that they're the ones, political opposites though they may be, that are striving for racial purity.

It's not black people so much as it is "new city lacking enbedded tribal voting blocks and political machines". Part of what makes Portland more fun than Cleveland is that there isn't a preexisting rump of troglodytes who've had time to build up voting blocks and constituencies. It's harder for a city to pay for bike lanes when it needs to siphon off money to overpay the vast swarm of parasitic contractors and alderman's nephews.